D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Maxperson]

Yes… the area where the PCs are!

It's not "where the PCs are" It's in the particular spot in the forest that the 2pm wandering monster roll would happen. I just roll it in advance for a better player experience. If they somehow move away from the forest and encounters shouldn't be rolled a 2pm and/or shouldn't be rolled on the forest table, it doesn't happen. The encounter is not following them.

 

[Pedantic]

I understand your point, but I think your particular desire for gamist strategic structures is probably out of the scope of even this broad, unwieldy thread.

I realize I've been shuffled into a 3rd rail, but I don't think that's quite fair. As you pointed out, everyone is fundamentally concerned with making player input matter and presenting novel events and things to interact with.

The precise nature of what "matter" means and the exact restrictions on what novelty is permissable are the underlying conflict. I feel like I'm showing my work on the first point, and everyone else is overindexed on the second.

That, and if I'm taking the fundamentally "gamist" position here, a lot of people have been using the word wrong.

 

[FrogReaver]

I want to emphasize and pull out this point because it demonstrates exactly my problem with these systems. Here, the players took some actions to prepare and avoid issues, and the response is... Just pick a different consequence. To me, this reads as saying "no matter how effectively the PCs scope the place out and try to avoid potential issues, a roll of 7-9 will always give them a consequence".

Hence, it seems to me the preparation doesn't really matter, only the rolls. I may be able to change the specific type of consequence, but there is no shortage of options for those and I'm not improving my odds of success in any way.

I mean, we've established that you really shouldn't use a lot of fail-forward if your focus of play is on navigating pre-established obstacles. This isn't new.

To me, it just sounds you like prefer trad-style games that are focused on solving the module. If that's your focus, of course you don't like fail-forward.

That raises a good question. Is there any way to procedurally generate content that won’t make a traditional oriented player feel like only the rolls matter?

 

[Maxperson]

For sure. And since I play with a pretty broad group of people across multiple tables and systems, understanding those different preferences and finding ways to synthesize approaches that can kind of satisfy most people is what I'm interested in.

Like @The Firebird said yesterday, he doesn't like DMs that don't do any prep work and just make stuff up. That's the bulk of my DMing! (Although I occasionally experiment with more OSR-type approaches.) So I'm curious how I would bridge that divide if I had players that had similar preferences.

If you run a pre-established setting, much of the pre-establishment has been done for you. The same with pre-written adventures like say, Against the Giants or something like that.

I used to prepare a lot in advance. These days due to life, I can only prepare some stuff and use a published setting. That still means that I'm improvising a lot, since I can't prepare everything and published settings have tons of holes in them.

I suspect our games, despite my positions in this thread, are more alike than different.

 

[Maxperson]

I think there is room for appreciation of both sides, especially if you're running prepped and non-prepped scenarios alike in a huge sandbox.
The prepped ones are maps and combat grids and beating the module while the non-prepped ones are seat of your pants free-flow Narrative, Fail Forward techniques and theatre-of-mind style.

Oh, I appreciate from a technical standpoint a lot of the player facing techniques. They aren't necessarily my cup of tea to run or play in, but that doesn't mean that I can't appreciate them. That's why I try to genuinely understand where the other side is coming from, instead of dismissing them or trying to get what they say wrong.

 

[Maxperson]

Wizard’s tower? I don’t know where that came from. I’ve been talking about the example that was linked with the cook and the kitchen.

I had to expand upon it way upthread since just having cook in kitchen didn't give enough detail. So for my posts, coming from my playstyle, I established more in order for the explanations of how and why I do things to make more sense.

 

[Pedantic]

That raises a good question. Is there any way to procedurally generate content that won’t make a traditional oriented player feel like only the rolls matter?

I feel like the traditional answer is "make the GM roll for it secretly" which is certainly one use of random tables.

I proposed a compromise position earlier that might work for more people: slow the process down by introducing a GM side meta currency that has to accumulate and be spent before they can introduce novel fiction. Something like Threat in Dusk City Outlaws. Daggerheart's Fear mechanic is close, but overshoots by introducing immediate negative outcomes.

 

[Maxperson]

No, you're playing the game wrong. When your argument gets shown to be without merit, instead of accepting that your argument was without merit, you simply change the example. Thus we go from "it's not quantum" to "I don't care if it's quantum".

Nobody is saying or implying that from my side of things. And nobody has shown(or can show) the position my side is taking on encounters and die rolls to be without merit.

In fact, what you just said about our arguments being without merit is you saying that we over here are playing the game wrong. And that attitude has been shown by more than one person on your side of this playstyle debate.

We on this side aren't saying that what you guys do is without merit. We are just saying it doesn't work for us.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Wheras for me, having my efforts snatched away from me even the one time would be a pretty serious party foul, and having it happen twice would be "something better change or I'm out and I'm going to try to convince as many people as I can to go with me."

Like I genuinely consider this a MASSIVELY not-okay thing, and I don't really understand how it can be parsed as completely in keeping with the so-called "traditional GM" approach to play.


Well, all I can say is, I would have no interest in participating in that. Negative interest, in fact. I don't like CVC combat.

But entirely apart from that: What if your character had won, only to realize that a random rat had already consumed the artifact on the second round without anyone noticing?

Would that not dampen your enjoyment of that experience, at least a little?

How would the rat thing make sense in the fiction? Give me a good explanation and I'll consider it.

The bottom line of course is what we've covered before. You and I have very different preferences and expectations of play and are not going to enjoy the same things. For some reason, everyone knows this but is still arguing.

 

[The Firebird]

That raises a good question. Is there any way to procedurally generate content that won’t make a traditional oriented player feel like only the rolls matter?

Yeah--random tables do this, because random tables are a type of fixed content. And the DM should interpret the results of the table in the current fiction. If it just says "servants" and the roll happened in the kitchen, it's fine for the DM to interpret some servants as cooks.